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The window was cracked just a bit, and I could hear the rain falling from the sky, that steady safe woosh of an endless shower of water, falling and falling from the sky, soaking the ground and the grass and the pavement. Water that falls and seeps into everything and finds it’s mark and nourishes.

It was a gray day. I couldn’t remember what time it ought to be, though it was probably the afternoon.

We were all alone. We would be for a few more days. The blinds were raised to show the view of Henry’s back yard, a lush green valley of grass that needed mowing, and in the distance at the bottom of the hill were the trees that led into an expansive forest. Their property extended somewhere into the woods. Usually we’d be out there, even in this rain, soaking wet, up against the wet bark of a tree. But we didn’t mind.

I could smell the rain in the air. It smelled like home, like something safe. The gray light cast down to the boy who lay in my arms. My eyes washed over him, drinking in the sight of his soft, white skin. He’d always been somewhat pale, but right now his whole body was flushed pink. His arms were pulled close and his hands rested on my chest, his fingers making slight movements against my naked chest that sent shivers through my body.

His eyes were closed, his moppy dark brown hair obscured most of his face. It was still damp from sweat. Beneath the covers, our naked legs were intertwined, and my still sticky cock was pressed against his thighs. His member was hiding somewhere, because he was curling up slightly and facing toward me.

I brushed a strand of dark hair away from his face. He took a staggering deep breath that told me he was falling asleep. I pulled him closer and felt his heart beating in his neck and his back, still thumping a little harder than normal. A few minutes ago we’d come together and collapsed, and I had pulled the blankets above us to fight the oncoming chill of the cool afternoon air.

No one would be home for several days. We were all alone. This was our time. We were lucky to have it. We’d been in love for years. Our parents thought we were just friends. We couldn’t tell them the truth, or anyone else. Not even our friends new. Though we both knew they suspected it and we didn’t deny it.

Sometimes we met up underneath an old abandoned bridge in the woods. Sometimes in the dense forest behind Henry’s house. And sometimes, when there was a blessed hour or two when no one was around, we could pull our clothes off, breathing quickly, hearts thumping, and fall into Henry’s soft queen size bed, and we would roll and giggle and kiss and bite and embrace and thrust and pull and we would make mistakes and accidentally hurt each other, and our bodies would awkwardly clap together and make silly noises, and sometimes there was a mess and sometimes there were unpleasant smells and sometimes one of us would have a runny nose and it would get on the other. Being in love is a messy business. Being human is messy. Touching is messy.

We didn’t mind. We treasured everything. Every moment and every touch, every taste and smell. He was the only person I’d ever loved, and I never wanted to love anyone else. The world was empty but for Henry and his moppy hair and his shorter height than mine, and his adorable round butt that made me instantly hard every time I saw it, and the way he laughed at stupid things in movies that made me roll my eyes, and the way I could feel him harden in his pants when I gave him even the most gentle kiss. The way his bright blue eyes would look up at me, because he was always lower than me, when we stood he was lower, and when we were in bed I held him against my chest. It’s strange that it was my arms around him that made me feel so safe.

When his head was laying against my chest, with his soft, wet breath against my skin, I was more than one body, his entire being was an extension of mine, with his own individual thoughts but we shared one beating heart that led us to come together again and again, our mouths sloppy and wet, our cocks throbbing with the intense beating of our hearts, our heads swimming and hot with something that couldn’t be expressed out loud, the whimpers that passed between our lips and the gentle moans and the loud gasps of pleasure only hinted at something so large that it filled up our chests and when we burst, bloody and warm, all over each other, we just kept growing until we filled the room and I think we might fill the whole world.

With my outer hand I explored the familiar contours of his body. The gentle down of hair against his butt, which he hated but which I thought was incredibly sexy. My fingers passed through those hairs that were so light they were almost blonde, perfectly splayed along the cheeks of his butt. My finger found it’s way between them into the warm crevice that seemed to beat with his heart for just a moment against my fingertip. He was nearly asleep but he noticed, and he squirmed gently, but it was a happy gesture. He was exhausted, but I knew that if I pushed my fingertip further, he would want more. I ran my fingertip up along the crevice between his cheeks and then my nails gave a gentle tickling scratch up his back to his shoulder, and he breathed the tiniest sigh of relief. I wanted him to have this reprieve, I knew that in an hour or so we’d be at it again.

But in this moment, with the lingering smell of our bodies and our sweat and our fluids still sticky and drying against me and inside of him, we were safe, and we were whole, and it was quiet. My head was swimming and I found myself getting sleepy too, but I kept my eyes open, and watched the rain outside the window.

This moment might come again and again in our lives. We might have a million of these moments. But this one would never be replaced, and none afterward would be the same. When we were older, we’d both look back on this moment and yearn for it, even if we still have the happiest of moments then, this one will never come again. This one is perfect.

I am more perfectly alive than any other person in the world. Anyone who yearns and tries and searches, it is this that they are searching for. It is this moment in the rain, with Henry pressed against me, and the utter safety of knowing that I don’t have to get out of bed if I don’t want to, and I don’t have to let him go.

I place a finger, the same one that was just giving his entrance a gentle prod, beneath his chin and with the slightest pressure I raise his face up, and his lips form the slightest of smiles. I lean down and my lips reach forward and find their home upon his, and his lower lip is in my mouth and I suck it gently, and a soft and gentle groaning for more comes from him chest and his throat, vibrating against my mouth. He wants more. He’s insatiable. I love him so much.

I kiss his closed eyes, my lips touching those soft eyelids, and his lashes flutter just a little from the surprise, but he’s smiling again. He opens those eyes and they look into mine, and they are blue and crystal and bright and full of everything I am, and he leans up to give me a kiss himself, one a little rougher than mine, his lips pressing hard against mine, and now my eyes are closed, and my pelvis instinctively thrusts forward as my cock begins lazily thickening, and finds its tip pressed against his erection. He lays his head against my chest again and his eyes are closed, and as I glance at his face I place a kiss on his temple.

Everything is worth this. Any pain is worth this. As long as I have this, I can be anything. As long as Henry is pressed against my chest and his lithe body is squirming in my arms, readying itself for more of our passionate and emotional connection, as long as I have the heat of his body to protect me from the sweet chill of the rain outside, I am alive. He is everything in my heart, and the world is a bright landscape upon which he walks, and his destination will always be in my arms, where I need him to be, where I can have safety and shelter. He is rain and forests and beds and moments.

His voice is a soft, crackling whisper, saying that he loves me. My vision becomes blurry. He’ll notice in a moment and ask me why I’m crying. But for a fraction of a moment, this is my reality, forever and ever, and I am so happy that I can’t express it, but my body is trying anyway, with my hard cock and my salty tears and my expectant lips when they come close to his.

And there is no world, no home, no life, but for this feeling, and even though in a few moments it will subside, and transform, and become something different, it’s here. And this is enough. This is enough.

(Special Request! I know that there are a few loyal followers who like my posts whenever I post something, and every post usually gets some attention from a few people. I’m not sure how many people actually take the time to read these blog posts, but I’m going to make a special request of you guys. If you take the time to read this, please take the time to comment, even if it’s something short and to the point.A long time ago, I read a post on someone’s blog that said said that if you’ve invested the time out of your day to read what someone has written, please also invest just one more moment to let them know what you thought of it. I almost never get comments on my blog and it means the world to me when people do comment, so please, if you like what you’re reading, leave me a comment and let me know what you think. Thanks guys, enjoy!)

So I ran across a bit of a stumbling block with my last entry in chapter one. I was watching an Australian romantic comedy series called Please Like Me, and the energy of humorously awkward romance bled into my writing and it completely didn’t fit within the story. At least not at this moment in the story. I realized very quickly that I needed to take another stab at this chapter, and I’m really happy that I did. When I first wrote it, in addition to the tonal problem, I also ran across a real problem of getting my characters from one point to another: I wanted to talk about the library, but first I had to get them to the castle gate, then through the corridors leading to the library. But I don’t actually know much about the castle layout.

So how did I solve this problem? I did what I always do, I started in the middle. This picks up in the first draft right after Hephaestion tells Lucas to lead the way out of the town square, and begins inside the old library in the castle. I may come back later to flesh out how they got there, or since it isn’t terribly important, I may leave it the way it is.

Another big problem I’ve had is that some very important storyline things are about to happen right here in this library, and I have been very intimidated. My goblin is about to make his grand appearance to my protagonist, and things are going to begin being set in motion that will actually cause the events of the plot to begin to unfold. That is, surprisingly, a very daunting thing to write. I’ve spoken the scene aloud several times to myself in the shower or in other places, but I needed to get Lucas and Hephaestion into the library to make it happen.

Also, this is a note about editing, but I’m not really sure how important of a role Rex and Eric will play in the story. Because I’ve been so interested in Lord of the Rings lately, I had thought about making Rex and Eric a part of the main cast, at least in the beginning, to journey with Lucas, but I’m also considering leaving them out entirely. Rex was a spur of the moment character I invented to get Lucas to Hephaestion, and Eric is a redesign of an older character from the conceptual material. Still, I can’t say how any of this will go from here, but I’m asking you to disregard the last version of the library as no longer canon, and take this one as the truth instead. I know that editing and redrafting is something that typically happens later, but I was unable to move on with the story from where I left it before.

The preamble is a bit longer this time, but I’m happy to continue the story for you now.

Moonlight fell in blue shafts from the high, long windows of the old library, and in the illumination, the dust of a long-forgotten place danced and swirled. Lucas stood leaning on the railing that overlooked the floor beneath, where more high windows cast moonlight over the long tables beneath, covered in books that lay half open, as though they were abandoned in haste. Chairs were still pulled out and scattered among the floor, and on all sides of the room were the rows and rows of high, tall wooden shelves, filled with books whose spines stood strong and quiet in the desolate place.

The library was a part of the royal wing, and like the rest of the royal wing of the castle it had fallen into disuse and, eventually, abandoned almost entirely. Across the many shelves were gaping holes where books had been taken to be moved to the scholar’s library on the other side of the castle, where work was still done, and no doubt the lamps still burned as the night came on in full. Lucas found himself hypnotized by the site of old library, standing like a ruin in the quiet moonlight. A set of wooden stairs that had once gleamed with polish and now covered with a fine layer of dust led up to the landing where he stood, and behind him were even more rows of bookshelves, and shelves built into the walls, reaching higher than anyone could stand, and so there were ladders placed haphazardly around the area, where the scholars had cleaned out anything of particular interest long ago.

It had been ten years since Lucas had visited this place, and even in this dark state, where no lanterns burned in any corner, only moonlight and shadow, it still held it’s charm. Lucas smiled to himself and he turned around. He walked through a darkened aisle where nothing could be made out on the spines of the books, and then stopped at a shelf where the moonlight fell, and he ran his forefinger along the dusty spines.

Old leather-bound volumes with faint traces of color that had long since been worn away adorned the spaces that weren’t left empty, and he grabbed one at random to examine it, pulling it out, and in the illumination of moonlight seeing a cloud of dust erupt from it’s vacant space. The old spine gave a loud creak as he opened the book to the center and ran a hand across it’s yellowed pages. In the moonlight he could make out some of the text, but it seemed uninteresting: an old history book, and it was recounting a battle of Alexandria. Since it didn’t refer to the city as New Alexandria, it must have been outdated, and supplanted with more reliable information, so this old volume was left. He slipped it back into it’s place on the bookshelf, noticing that the two books on either side of the vacant space hadn’t budged at all, so used to sitting still and silent were they.

He explored his way through several more aisles, pausing to run his fingers along the dusty spines, but from the titles saw nothing that sparked his interest. Nothing fictional, no tales of adventures, no chronicles of great heroes. Mostly books about Alexandrian history and law. He saw littered against the stone columns scattered through the library glass cases under which terribly old volumes sat, their pages opened, the ink faded. He stopped in front of one, a shaft of blue light cast on it, and he peered down to see a crude drawing of a wolf, and some text beside it giving it a name. He wasn’t sure if this was a mythological story of an actual account of a hunter fighting a ravenous beast. It was still too difficult to make out much more than a few words.

Lucas heard a cork pop and it startled him, he turned quickly to see Hephaestion sitting against the far stone wall, just beneath a window and covered in moonlight himself. He had opened the bottle of brown liquid that he’d carried within his satchel. Lucas held the empty satchel over his shoulder, hoping that he would find something in the library worth bringing home, but so far nothing had spoken to him. He made his way over to Hephaestion and folded his arms with a look of false disapproval.

“Cadet,” said Lucas in a tone of mock authority, “Sitting about on the floor after hours in a restricted area, drinking pilfered liquor. What are we to make of you?”

Hephaestion grinned and turned the bottle up, taking one hardy swig before coughing and pressing his fist to his chest. Lucas raised his eyebrows. Hephaestion wiped his mouth and looked up, then croaked out, “Pretty good stuff.”

“Really?” asked Lucas in genuine curiosity, sitting down on the floor in front of Hephaestion, who handed him the bottle.

Lucas looked down at the bottle. Clear and a little dusty, with some words written across the front in ornate calligraphy that he couldn’t quite read in the dim light. He’d never really liked alcohol, though he’d drank wine at official dinners, and had been told by his father that to refuse the wine was an insult to the staff. He enjoyed the bitter red wine more than the sweet white wine, and he assumed from the sickening smell of this liquid that it would be bitter. He exhaled and bravely took a drink, upending the bottle the same way Hephaestion had, instantly choking, and then setting the bottle down and coughing, some of the liquid escaping from his lips as he did so. It burned his throat and seemed to remain hot as it settled somewhere in his chest.

“That is disgusting,” croaked Lucas.

Hephaestion nodded matter-of-factly. “Indeed, but I think that’s the idea.”

“Why would people knowing drink this?” asked Lucas, although he didn’t have to have an answer because even after one drink he could already feel his head swimming.

Lucas got up and walked over to the wall beside Hephaestion, who took another, more cautious drink, and kept it down this time. Lucas slid down the wall to sit beside Hephaestion, and the two passed the bottle between one another, drinking quietly.

“You know,” said Lucas after a few minutes, feeling suddenly very conversational, “There really is a magic to this old place, but the books don’t seem terribly interesting.”

Hephaestion finished a drink and shrugged, “I don’t really like reading all that much.”

Lucas felt a little puzzled, “Why not?” he asked, “Don’t you want to learn about things you didn’t know before?”Hephaestion nodded, “Absolutely,” he said, “But I prefer to hear it from people older and wiser than me, I like to hear it spoken. I don’t mind learning about history and philosophy and even theology, I just don’t want to read it. Seems like when I read it, I’m left to sort out what it all means, but when a professor or a tutor explains it, they know how to make sense of it.”

“You just need practice making sense of things,” said Lucas, and realized his words were slurring a little.

“Do you think,” said Hephaestion, “Your father is going to be angry with you for sneaking out?”

“He is,” replied Lucas, “And cold, and unfeeling, and demanding, and surprisingly boring. He commands respect everywhere he goes, and yet he never has much interesting to say. Always going on about politics and talking about the welfare of other people, but he doesn’t seem to show any interest in the welfare of people around him.”

“You mean you,” suggested Hephaestion.

“I mean me,” affirmed Lucas, “He absolutely could not care less about my interests, but he feels the need to have control over everything I do. I’m nineteen, I want to make my own choices.”

“It sounds nice to me, though,” said Hephaestion, “To have a parent to make rules for you. My only parents are the officers, and they believe in letting people learn things the hard way. If I want to go out in the middle of the night and get myself into trouble, I can do it, and then I can come home with a terrible headache and a black eye, and they just nod and tell me that I learned my lesson.”

“I wish my father were like that,” said Lucas, drinking bravely now, as the bottle was less than halfway full.

“No you don’t,” said Hephaestion with an edge of sadness in his voice, “I never got to know either of my parents, they died when I was so young that I don’t even know if my memories are real or if I’m just imagining them. I have this idea of what my mother probably looked like but I can’t be sure. And my father, I just remember him holding my hand and walking me around town, nothing much else. When they died, I was sent to the academy and raised by the officers.”

Lucas had heard about all of this before but it still saddened him. Even though he wished Hephaestion had had the chance to know his family, he wouldn’t have traded places with him and wished his own father on Hephaestion for anything.

“I don’t remember my mother, obviously,” interjected Lucas, “She died in childbirth. So I’ve truly never had a mother, as long as I’ve been alive. Except maybe for a minute or two. It was just my father and the nannies and tutors.”

Hephaestion snickered, “Nannies.”“What?” asked Lucas incredulously.

“It sounds so pampered, doesn’ it?” asked Hephaestion, turning to look at Lucas with a smile, “Raised by nannies in a governer’s mansion.”

“It wasn’t our mansion until my father became governer,” said Lucas.

Hephaestion rested a hand on Lucas’ shoulder. Lucas’ pulse quickened but only slightly. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely, “It isn’t your fault your mother died, otherwise there wouldn’t have been any nannies. I shouldn’t have been so callous.”

Lucas shook his head reassuringly, “It really doesn’t bother me to talk about my mother,” he said, “For all purposes I’ve never had one. And in as much as I’ve had a father, well… he hasn’t done a very good job of being a father.”

Hephaestion turned away from the wall and laid out flat on his back, spreading out on the floor. The light from the window was fully illuminating him. His cotton shirt was coming up just above his waist and the bottom of his stomach was exposed. In the light Lucas saw the light sprinkling of fine brown hair along his lower stomach. He also noticed the small hill in Hephaestion’s trousers between his legs, and had a difficult time looking away, since Hephaestion’s eyes were closed and he didn’t notice. Lucas shifted and then reached between his legs to adjust himself. He took another drink. He was surprised to realize it was the last of the liquor.

Hephaestion sat up suddenly, and looked directly into Lucas’ eyes. The moonlight was illuminating his face perfectly. He looked so young. He was twenty, but he might have fourteen. His auburn hair framed his face in long, bright curls, and his eyes were chestnut, the perfect complement to the color of his hair, deep eyes that always showed so much genuine emotion, framed by thick eyebrows. His skin was an olive tan, his jaw was square and his full lips were in an expression of seriousness that was in no way menacing. His eyes always seemed to be pleading to understand, there was a strength to his taut body and square features, and a gentleness in the way he applied them.

“Do you hate your father?” he asked.

Lucas was a little shocked by the question. “Why would you ask?”

“You’ve told me so many awful things about him,” said Hephaestion, “The few times I’ve spoken with him when I’ve been to your house he’s had little to say, and he does seem very cold. He frightens me. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. And I just suddenly realized I’ve never heard you say you love him.”

Lucas thought for a moment. Did he hate his father? His immediate instinct was to affirm that he did hate him, but he wasn’t sure that hate was the right word. “I….” he began hesitantly, “I guess I just don’t really care about him. I don’t… love him. I don’t love him, but I don’t know that I hate him. I don’t care enough to hate him. I just want him to go away.”

Hephaestion looked up into the light from the window and an expression of thoughtfulness crossed his face. Then he asked, “He’s never hurt you, has he?”

Yes. In every possible way.

“Um,” said Lucas, “Well…”

“I mean physically,” added Hephaestion.

Yes.

“I, uh…” began Lucas again.

Hephaestion shook his head, “It’s fine. You don’t have to say anything. Just… I just don’t want to think of him hurting you. You deserve better than that. I want you to be safe.”

Lucas felt a warmth in his chest that came from some source other than the liquor which made his head churn. “Thank you,” he said, unsure of what else to say, “I… thank you.”

Hephaestion laid back down on his back, and spread out his limbs again. Lucas felt suddenly very brave, and he got down to his knees and crawled over, then curled up beside Hephaestion with his back to Hephaestion’s side, and Hephaestion reached down and put an arm under Lucas’ head. He rested his head on Hephaestion’s warm arm, after a few moments feeling the blood pumping a little harder to compensate for Lucas being there.

Neither of them spoke. Lucas felt warmth in his chest. He sighed contentedly. He thought he felt Hephaestion’s chest shake behind him in a slight chuckle. His eyes were heavy, and now that he was horizontal he realized the room was spinning. He shut his eyes, and the spinning stopped being disorienting and became comforting. The floor swam beneath him, and the warmth of Hephaestion’s body seemed to envelop him, and he fell asleep.

Sneak into the closet to get our presetsTake a break for story timeLet’s take a walk through the woods at nightTell me your name and I’ll tell you mineYou are the happiest time of my lifeYou are the happiest I’ve ever beenI’m so guilty that I can’t sit stillI wanted to tell you I’m sorry for lookingTell you I’m sorry for lyingA little is enough for meTwo days of the week is enough for meThere is a picture of you on my wallI’ll borrow this and you can borrow thisHours that go by as moments in time with youBelieving anything that brings me nearer to youI’m swelling when you’re nearbyYou understand me so well

Why does it feel like we’re growing apartWhen once you understood my thoughtsI’ll draw you this symbol if you’ll show me that pictureI’ve been saving snapshots of you in my heart for all these yearsAll love is a shadow of the firstAll those who came after you are pale imitations of what you gave meI never even pressed my lips to yours until after it was overSaying your name over and overYou pulled me out of the wet desert my worldYour wet grass and morning grayWork with me and play againI watched your heart breakingI wouldn’t take advantage

I said you were my brotherI wanted you to be my loverWe were in loveI think I’m seeing that nowI think you were in love with me tooWere you?You asked me, “what about us?”I never thought you knew there was an us

In October of 2010, I broke up with my boyfriend of two years, Nathan. It was a long time coming, and though my heart was aching, I was better for it, and I began to feel truly happy for the first time in a long time. I felt freedom and creativity and release and sorrow and longing and passion all at once, and I was happy. I wrote a new song, called Cow’s Milk, about the utter sadness I felt, the quiet sorrow. I started trying to date people online again, first through a website called the Gay Youth Corner. I somehow ran into one of my only friends from middle school, Jonathan, and he and I started spending time together. He told me he was gay and that he’d had a crush on me back when I was openly gay and flirted with him, and he called me names and made me feel awful and unworthy to be his friend. I started listening to Marilyn Manson and Flyleaf, I wrote some great blog posts about how I was feeling, Ke$ha released a new EP with a song called the Harold Song that kind of ripped my heart out a little bit.

2010 ended on a good note. I was cold, sick on Christmas, and lonely, but the anxiety I’d been suffering with for years that had come to a head in 2010 and caused me to be agorophobic was finally soothed when I was at last given medication for it (Celexa and Klonopin, to whom it may concern), and I was suddenly sleeping well, my panic attacks were replaced with a serene feeling of invincibility, and life had hope in it because Nathan no longer anchored me into the muddy earth of the loss of my virginity. I began to believe that I could be happy, and that I could find someone who would make me happy.

Things with my mother, however, came to a boiling point previously unmatched, not because the feelings of anger and mistrust were at their highest ever, but because action was taken on her part to be done with me. I made it clear that I wasn’t Christian anymore, and that I didn’t believe in God. When I was home alone, I pulled the Bible I was given when I was 12 from the top drawer of my dresser, and I sat in the floor and ripped it to shreds, and kept the pieces in a trash bag in my closet that I just forgot to throw away, and my mother found. She said a lot of very interesting, ignorant, indoctrinated things to me, like that I had brought “the devil” into her house and she was going to have to anoint the doors to exorcise him. Around this time I also became very angry with my father, who is another story altogether, but when I finally confronted him on being a lying, sick, ignorant, indoctrinated, abusive bastard, he started screaming at me and for all intents and purposes threatened to kill me. He said if I ever called him again he would find me, and he would come to Charlotte and fuck me up. I lost it entirely, and had probably the only nervous breakdown I’ve ever truly had. I couldn’t breathe, and my mother, in her audacity, screamed at me, telling me that I need to tell her what happened, angry that I wasn’t, while I cried and had no control over my breathing, and needed my friend who I had on the phone to help me. My father’s new wife called me back to continue the confrontation, and I asked her to tell him please not to hurt me, and I’d never contact him again. Of course she asked why she should do that, since I had, as they put it, such “big phone balls.” I told her I couldn’t do this and I hung up. I have spoken to my father one time since then, when he called a few months later to wish me a merry Christmas, and I awkwardly said it back to him and made up some excuse that my mother was calling and I had to get off the phone. Someone has said to me that things with my father are not over. They’re probably right. Maybe one day I’ll hurt him the way he deserves, and beat his sick, child-molesting ass until he admits to himself and to me that he hurt me, that he broke me before anyone else did, and that he doesn’t deserve anyone’s love, not even his own, and that he prays his soul will rip into shreds from the pain of hell and his existance in this cosmos will cease as penance for his lies to himself and his abuse toward my mother and myself.

But I digress. My mother lost it when I had a guy over to the house and stayed alone in my room with him for two hours, changed my sheets after she left, and she found an open box of condoms in the bathroom (I hadn’t used a condom with the guy because we blew each other, I had just jerked off with a condom for fun on some other occasion, and that was why the box was open, but that wasn’t her business anyway). She said she was done with my lifestyle, and we had a fight that ended in her telling me I had to go, now. So I called Nathan, and he brought me to his house. His father told me I had one week to stay there, despite the fact that for the previous two years I’d stayed at their house for much longer than two weeks at a time and no one had a problem with it, but it didn’t matter. I was going to move to California with someone I knew from Facebook, but he suddenly turned into a big jerk about a week before time to leave, and I decided that the already bad idea of going to California with him was now a very bad idea. I was about to look into homeless shelters, including this place in Charlotte for gay youth, of which I still cannot discern if it’s a homeless shelter, a community center, or just a small lounge, when someone I knew said she’d told her two aunts, who were married, about my situation, and that they wanted me to call them.

I called Eileen when her number was given to me, and she said, “So I heard you need a place to crash.” I told her that I did, and we had a very nice conversation. She presented herself as a very real, down-to-Earth person, and in truth she WAS. So within a couple of days or so, I can’t really remember, my stuff (which had mostly fit into a couple boxes/containers, and some trash bags) was put into Nathan’s father’s car and he took me to Cramerton, to their apartment, and they, in true lesbian fashion, had my stuff unloaded and in my room within minutes. The first night we all sat in the bedroom and had pizza, as a family, the two of them, me, their grandmother, their nephew, and the two dogs, along with the occasional cat who wandered into the room, of which there were three.

Kim and Eileen were cool. They were nice people. They treated me like I was family. I was happy. We didn’t have very much to eat, but we made it, we always had dinner, even if it was something simple like sandwiches. We shopped at the bargain grocery store, and I cleaned the house while they were at work, and looked for jobs online. I really spent most of my time listening to music, playing Eileen’s Nintendo DS (Casltevania: Aria of Sorrow, Sword of Mana, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days) and watching some Will and Grace DVDs I bought, using the money I made still working with my mother for her cleaning business. I didn’t really try very hard to find a job, because I’d still never had to take care of myself at all, I was used to other people taking care of me, and now Kim and Eileen were taking care of me. I felt stable, though. I went to bed and woke up and approximately the same time every day, almost never slept past noon anymore (for what reason I can’t tell you, presumably it was my pills, since I’d run out of insurance for mine but Kim and Eileen took the same medication as me and Eileen kept all the medicine in a chest and dealt it out to everyone in the house every morning and evening), there were rituals, like walking the dogs every night and talking to Eileen, eating dinner in the bedroom (the kitchen table was reserved for use by the cats, we ate in the bedroom, Kim and Eileen in their bed with the dogs, Kim’s mother and myself in chairs with trays, and when their nephew Timmy was there, he ate with us too), going out with Kim and Eileen to the grocery store, to the thrift store, watching movies together, playing Timmy’s PS3, listening to Bitch and Animal in the car. I was happy. I’d found people that I felt were understanding and kind.

They also loved to fight. Kim had a terrible temper and got upset about everything, Eileen was usually the voice of reason but they both loved to be angry. Eileen lost it once and screamed at me. I don’t think I remembered until now how much I thought of Eileen. She was a soldier, she’d lived in Germany, she was intelligent and understanding and tough, and Kim, though somewhat immature, loved to laugh. I was a part of their family. I called them my lesbian moms. On Valentine’s Day we cleared the table and ate a meal together, and everyone got presents, they gave me a basket with candy and a DVD of the Osbournes they’d bought me from a thrift store I mentioned earlier that we’d run across. When I told them I was still getting over Nathan, they tried to help by setting up an account on the dating site Plenty of Fish for me, and I started talking to guys and going out on dates with them.

The first guy I went out with was a guy named Derek. He lived two hours away and drove to come see me, and took me to his house. He liked the Spice Girls and Taylor Swift, and pretty much all female teen pop singers. We kissed when he stopped at a red light, and I played him some of Boys For Pele while we drove through the woods. We laid in his bed in the dark and cuddled, and at some point we had sex. I don’t really remember it very well, except that he couldn’t bottom so I did it, and his bathroom was missing a wall and had a curtain there instead of one, so he basically heard everything coming out when it was over. He had figurines of Yuna, Rikku and Paine in their Final Fantasy X-2 garb in his closet, he had a kitten that liked to try and interrupt us while we were having sex by jumping into the action. He was probably a little overpowered by my sexuality. I’ve found that most people are. I’m an extremely passionate, sexual person, I’m like a 16 year old on viagra after a trip to the YMCA showers at most times, and I think he didn’t know how to handle it. He made a lot of comments to me that hurt my feelings, though he said he was just playing, but I’d had enough of people making mean comments to me and saying they were kidding. I’m sure he wasn’t a bad guy but that wasn’t the kind of thing that I needed or wanted. Kim and Eileen were also extremely possessive, protective, and paranoid whenever I went off with someone, and expected me back by a certain day, because they gave me only the medicine I’d need for the time I’d be gone. I really wasn’t very attracted to Derek, he was a little overweight and had a hairy back. I’m not saying that everyone with a hairy back is unnatractive, but I just wasn’t quite feeling it. The fact that his cock was less than huge played a role too. As did the fact that on the two occassions I came to his house I had to stay in his house with the lights off during the day because he lived on his family’s land, and they were not to know that I was there, I was a secret being kept there while he went and worked for 8 hours. There was also little to no food to eat while he was gone, and I had very little to occupy me since the internet didn’t like to work very well and I was by myself. I was probably a little scared to be there alone, and it didn’t get much better when he got home from work and didn’t pay me much attention, made offhanded mean remarks to me, and refuted my attempts to have sex with him. He was Nathan all over again.

We just fell out of communication, there was never an official conversation where we said we were going to stop seeing each other. The next person I dated was much more interesting. His name was Brian.

When Nathan and I broke up, he started seeing someone around New Year’s. The idea came into my head that the three of us could be in a relationship with one another, and I just went with it. Not being with Nathan and his new guy, but the idea of being in a three-person relationship. I started to think about how fascinating it would be, about how it made so much sense, about the divine implications of their being three of us and the divine power of the number three itself, I started to fantasize about my relationship with two other people.

I never really thought it could happen. Brian and I met and had a great conversation. We seemed to be just like one another. We were both gemenis, we both loved video games, we were both big Final Fantasy nerds, we conversed well, I thought it was going to be perfect. He told me about Travis. Travis was his boyfriend. They were looking for a third person to enter into their relationship, and it was important that we all be comfortable with one another, but I was supposed to be dating Brian, Travis was just a part of the relationship with Brian, and I was going to be in a relationship with Travis too.

Oddly enough, Brian was one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met in my life. From the moment he laid eyes on me he decided I wasn’t good enough. When I finally forced out of him later why, during my visit with them, he was so rude, curt, and judgemental, he basically said it was because I was fat. Or rather, that my pictures were “misleading.” That I wasn’t as skinny as I’d looked online. I made myself look like more of an idiot by just wordvomiting my whole life story to them when I didn’t know what to say, and felt myself under Brian’s judgement. They wanted to get to know me better so I was telling them everything, but it only seemed to be making it worse. I kept trying to come on to Brian but he seemed really uncomfortable, I was still sure that it was going well but I hadn’t realized yet that I was completely unwanted by Brian. That night we all slept together. I fondled Brian in his sleep for apparently an hour or so, and eventually he reciprocated and we both got off, and at some point I sucked Travis off too. The next day when they both went to work and I was alone, I cried, realizing what an idiot I’d been. I had really been sure that Brian, Travis and I were going to work out. I’d felt a hope with them that I hadn’t felt in a relationship for a long time. Maybe it was the newness of the situation, the idea that since the two of them wanted a three-person relationship and so did I, we HAD to be right for one another. I was going to become a part of them and them a part of me, I was going to go to sleep every night with someone I loved on each side of me, holding me and making love to me.

But that isn’t what happened. I came home to Kim and Eileen’s apartment feeling like a loser, completely drained of self confidence and wearing one of Brian’s white tee shirts, I’d come on the shirt I’d been wearing, luckily it was made to look as though it were stained with white blotches, so no one could tell that part of it was my semen. I didn’t wash Brian’s tee shirt, which was too tight on me, when I took it off. I kept it and smelled it and breathed in his scent, and I think I slept with it a couple of times too. I was sure I’d never see them again, but I talked to Brian and he said that Travis was interested in seeing me again, even though he didn’t want to date me anymore. He said that he was going to date a third guy and Travis was going to date a third guy, but we’d be different guys, and essentially it’d be two seperate relationships with Brian and Travis connected in the center. I began to realize that Brian’s reasons for wanting another person in his relationship were because he didn’t appreciate Travis or love him for exactly who he was, and because Travis had had an ex-boyfriend who had fucked him so many times a day that he’d given him hemorrhoids and he couldn’t bottom anymore without going through a lot of pain, and he never topped, so he and Brian couldn’t really have sex anymore, and Brian wanted someone to fill Travis’s role as his bottom. Brian was all about “dom” and “sub” too, he liked to categorize people into tops, bottom, dominants, and submissives. I think I was expected to be intermediate in both ways, so as to be a bridge between them, but as I said, Brian cast judgement upon me from the moment he met me and was never interested in me since then.

It was with hesitation that I went to see them again. Brian was so much of an asshole I almost cried at dinner, and at some point the next day he and I got into an argument. But Travis on the other hand was nice to me, though he didn’t say much, and mostly enjoyed me constantly massaging and doting on him. Travis was, and is, an extremely sweet person. He was never judgmental to me the way that Brian had been. He wasn’t as sexual with me this time as he’d been the last, he said he wanted to save some of that. I was annoyed and somewhat repulsed by Brian’s personality, but I dealt with him. I helped Travis take nude pictures when he decided to become a webcam model, submitted his application, and got a call from the owner of the website within at most an hour or so but probably much less, fervently praising Travis’ looks and talking to him about the site and the benefits and rules of the site. I went home feeling happy with Travis, and extremely annoyed by and unnatracted to Brian. I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I confronted Brian on how judgemental he was toward Travis, how selfish he was, and I told Travis that I liked him but it couldn’t happen with Brian in the picture. Travis and I have communicated some since then, he broke up with Brian soon afterward, I was happy for him, and he got into a relationship with someone he’s still with. I don’t usually talk to Travis anymore but he’s just as friendly with me now as he was then.

I didn’t give up after Brian and Travis. I met Jimmy probably sometime in March, and he, like Derek had, drove a couple hours from where he lived in Greenville, South Carolina to see me. We went on a date to the Olive Garden (I stole my napkin so that I’d have something from our first date, I got the idea from an episode of Will and Grace when one of Grace’s boyfriends steals a menu to keep from their first date). We didn’t say much. We mostly smiled and played footsie. It was very cute, but I think I was trying to ignore the fact that we didn’t connect. But Jimmy was nice to me, and when we parked outside of the mall we kissed. It wasn’t anything special. He seemed to really enjoy it and felt that it was great, I think I knew then that there was no spark on my end when it came to Jimmy. But the date continued, we went on a walk through the woods in the park, Jimmy was kind, attentive, and understanding, he listened to me and cared about what I had to say, he smiled when I started making out with him furiously and told me to calm down (and massaged my neck and my ears, since I’d told him it was an easy way to calm me now), and when finally we took turns peeing into a creek and not peeking at each other, we ended up jacking off together, and came at the exact same moment. Our cumshots crossed in mid-air. I think he made some comment, when I mentioned this, about it being fate or something. I think it was on our second date that we made out in the back of his car in the parking lot of the same park and jacked off together in his backseat, which we pulled down and had our feet in the trunk. It was romantic. I think I knew in the back of my mind that Jimmy and I weren’t the one’s for one another, but I was happy with how romantic it was. Jimmy was kind to me. He didn’t yell. He didn’t cause a problem. He listened. He was understanding. He was pretty cute. He seemed to like how crazy and silly and odd I was, and listened to whatever music I played and usually seemed to really enjoy it. The romance of the relationship was mostly me drinking in all of his attention, when really the only person I felt in love with was myself, which I think everyone should be, at least at some point, it’s a nice way to be, to be enamored with yourself and your personality and who you are and your beauty and everything about yourself.

I got a job at the Waffle House on my first try. I walked in, filled out an application, talked to the manager, dropped my mom’s name (she worked for Waffle House for somewhere between thirty years, she was a manager and a general manager, and the guy sitting at the bar beside me happened to know her) and the manager made me a handwritten training schedule. When I showed up for my first day of work, however, I was told that I couldn’t start because my background check hadn’t come through. Kim and Eileen just did not seem to grasp this concept. The manager said that she would call me, but Kim and Eileen kept making me call her, and she never answered. Still, they had me call her every day, to see if my background check had come through yet. Jimmy and I had planned to spend some time together at his apartment where he lived with some friends in South Carolina, so, since my background check hadn’t come through and I couldn’t start working yet, we went ahead and proceeded with the plans.

I think I knew, when Jimmy showed up that night and I walked out the door to his car, that I was leaving Kim and Eileen’s house and going to live with him. I felt it. I knew that I was moving to somewhere new, and that life was an adventure after all, that I was being young and romantic and happy, and that I was going off on an adventure with a boy. I remember listening to Precious Things while trying to stay awake in the car, singing along to it and amusing Jimmy with my awesome antics. When we got to his apartment I met Danielle, a roommate who’d just recently been taken on by Jimmy and Melanie, the transgendered male-to-female girl who was the only real tenant in the apartment and who rented to Jimmy and Danielle because she couldn’t afford the place on her own.

Let me break it down for you. There were Jimmy and I, who were both gay boys. There was Danielle, who was a bisexual girl. There was Danielle’s boyfriend Michael, who refused to identify as a sexuality, but claimed he was interested in only girls, though at one point he wanted to have sex with one of his friends who was male and liked to dress as a girl, and they would have sex while he was dressed as a girl, for the record Jimmy and I both repeatedly said Michael was gay. There was Melanie, who was born male and given the name John, and she couldn’t afford hormone therapy or surgery, so she had a slender male body with long hair; she was, I assume, bisexual, and her girlfriend Carson, who was probably bisexual, but I’m not entirely sure how she identified. Oh, and with the exception of Jimmy and I, everyone who lived in the house or who came to the house were furries. Not the kind that dress up as bears and have orgies, the anime kind… who dress up as foxes and may or may not have orgies, I’m not sure.

So our house was a nice, juicy rainbow lolipop of sexualities.

Danielle had Jimmy and I make out for her amusement (and pleasure? perhaps?), and I knew then that I really wasn’t planning on leaving Jimmy’s. I also knew that, because Jimmy was not an extremely strong-willed person and he basically did what I asked/told him, he’d let me move in. I don’t mean to say that I was intentionally taking advantage of Jimmy’s passive, kind nature, but the fact remains that what I asked for I usually got from him. On our first night, we fooled around in his bed (he wanted us to wait to have sex until we were ready), and he came on my face. I think it was probably the hottest sexual encounter we had. We were also officially boyfriends, we’d decided after out first date and I’d had the keen joy of finally changing my relationship status on Facebook and seeing everyone’s comments about us dating ourselves. Jimmy and I looked exactly alike, you see, there were comments many times about us being long-lost twins. Given that I’m a Gemini and I’ve always felt duped not having a twin, I didn’t mind it. Also, since I’m not bothered by incest, especially not gay incest, I was happy about this. I think in some way I’m always looking at my life as a whole and seeing the perception of how it reflects who I am. In honesty I enjoy contraversial things, but not because they’re contraversial, I just question everything, and I don’t believe in boundaires. The fact that my boyfriend and I looked alike made some people think of incest and quiver uncomfortably, but I was happy that it seemed like incest, because it made me seem more unique. I think I’ve always been one of those people who likes to be different, because I am different, and revel in how different I am. Though of course there are many others like me in every aspect that I’m different, I feel that I’m a fantastic person, so I think I pull all of these qualities together in a special way.

If that sounds vain, it’s just because I love myself. I told you I was in love with myself. I’m not now the way I was then, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But I want people to see how special and unique I am. I think that’s why I want to be a musician and why I want to be famous, famous in my way, not necessarily appearing on television (much), but people knowing who I am and loving me and obsessing over me. Everyone wants it, just no one will admit it. Celebrities like being celebrities, because it makes them feel special. The difference is that I’m already special, and I want people to see it. I want to be loved. In every way. It’s another way in which I want to be loved, to have fans.

After my first night at Jimmy’s, Eileen called and asked if I’d called about my background check at Waffle House. I explained to her that it wasn’t doing any good, and she got mad at me and said I was more interested in finding a boyfriend than in having a job or being responsible, and then there was a long, dramatic fight that mostly happened over Facebook, with Kim calling me a lot of names and behaving like a 7th-grade girl on MySpace, and saying she was throwing my stuff out on their lawn. After calling my mother and asking her to get my stuff, my mother presumably calling and talking to them, they told me they weren’t going to throw out my stuff but that I had 24 hours to get it. Of course that wouldn’t work because Jimmy didn’t have the gas to bring me back that soon, so finally they decided that when I could come back to get my stuff, I would, as long as I returned their keys and a Queer As Folk DVD of theirs I’d taken with me (which incidentally I hadn’t watched, I only ever really watched it once when I went to visit Nathan).

They somehow managed to fit my stuff (which consists almost entirely of books and CDs, along with some miscellaneous things, mostly stuff from my relationship with Nathan) into like 6 different small boxes, but we got it into Jimmy’s truck, and my mother took what remained, along with my furniture, which she had someone bring his truck to the apartment to take to her house. We went to the Waffle House (not the same one I’d been hired at) and my mom told Jimmy that now that I was out of medication (since I didn’t have the money for mine and Kim and Eileen only gave me approximately what would have been left of mine out of what they had, which was about four days to a week’s worth), I was going to go crazy and I’d be way too much for him to handle. She did not offer to buy my medication for me, or to take me to the doctor, she let me go off with Jimmy and decided I would fend for myself when my medication ran out and I withdrew from it and went back to feeling anxiety and panic. She never offered to take me back into her home, though I had asked her once as Kim and Eileen’s house, and she immediately denied it.

My mother spent a long time doing everything she could to provide food, clothing, entertainment, and a home for me. She gave up her time and nearly killed herself working so that I could eat and have nice things, and have Christmases with a lot of gifts. But that is not the same thing as being a good parent to your child. I don’t think she would ever have understood me even had she tried to, but if she had tried, that at least would have meant something. Or maybe it wouldn’t have. And maybe she did try. But for whatever reason, the gulf that expanded between my mother and myself, wider and wider, since I was 13 years old, never was crossed entirely. And what she may not perceive as cruelty, or what she may not have intended to be cruelty, was cruelty to me, and she let me go to South Carolina knowing that I would drown.

So I went to South Carolina with Jimmy.

And I was happy.

Inexplicably, perfectly, happy.

And we were starving.

Jimmy worked at McDonalds and we had no money for food, what we did have was given to him by his parents but they didn’t have that much money either, and we ran out of food quickly. We are ramen noodles, peanut butter, and bread. Every few days we’d have pizza from Little Caesar’s. I was withdrawing from my medication too, taking less and less of it, cutting my pills into fourths and taking them every other day, then every two days, I never actually finished with what I had, I spent about a week withdrawing from them. I was extremely dizzy for days, I was very annoyed and short-tempered and easily angered, and it was in this state that I had no choice but to look for a job, which I did not do very well, since I spent most of time listening torrenting music, watching porn (Jimmy at one point put parental controls on his computer to stop me, which pissed me off to no end), playing Rift, which he introduced me to, and watching a LOT of Family Guy, amongst other shows he and I (but mostly I) had DVR’d, since he had really good cable and very fast internet (these were two things which he really enjoyed and always considered necessary to have, and I didn’t, and don’t, fault him for).

An event not entirely pertinent to the story: I torrented the movie Shortbus, mostly skimmed through it for sex scenes to masturbate to, and ran across Bitch in a scene, and was really excited that I knew who it was. I wanted to tell Kim and Eileen, but of course talking to them was not something I was interested in doing.

I started liking Shakira and we went to a locally owned record store, the only one I’ve ever been to that wasn’t a chain, and they had a lot of really interesting music, from most artists you could imagine, in a variety of formats. There was a porn section too but we had no money, and porn was free, and I didn’t entirely want used porn.

I dyed my hair and my eyebrows blonde, much to Jimmy’s dismay, and he wouldn’t talk to me for most of the night.

I yelled at him a lot. I was angry about my situation, and I was withdrawing, and more than anything I was hungry, and I was still very sad about Nathan, and I knew, though I hadn’t yet acknowledged it to myself, that Jimmy and I were not a good couple. We had sex, and it was extremely underwhelming. I almost gave up because it was just awkward and uncomfortable. Jimmy was not extremely blessed in the cock department, and he didn’t know how to use what he had; I mostly spent all my energy just trying to keep him from slipping out of me. Meanwhile if I topped him, he complained the whole time and whined that it hurt, so the only way for him to have sex with me comfortably was for me to bottom, which I didn’t really tell him wasn’t good at all. Basically, Jimmy and I were not good in bed together. I won’t say he was bad in bed, because sex is about a connection, and we didn’t really have much of one, so our sex wasn’t very good. I did, however, need to get off a LOT. And I’m a person who has always gotten off a lot. I was sucking him off or otherwise coming onto him many times a day, apart from watching porn and jerking off every time we were in bed together. At some point neither of us were shooting almost any come out anymore because I’d used up everything we had with my extreme sexual appetite. I should mention that I’ve heard that antidepressants lessen your sex drive, so coming off of my antidepressants might have had something to do with this, combined with the fact that I had nothing to do, and I’m an extremely sexual person already.

But I cared for him. I knew in the back of my mind and in the back of my heart that we weren’t going to last, maybe I knew more than I was letting myself know, but I loved it when he came home from work at 5 in the morning and crawled into bed beside me, and woke me up to talk to me while I was half asleep, and held me. And I loved waking up in the morning and holding him close around his furry stomach and pushing his ass into my crotch and holding him tightly close to me, kissing his neck and his face and playing with his hair, waking him up by sucking his cock or eating his ass. I don’t know, even now, what it was that we had, because it wasn’t a relationship but it wasn’t a friendship, and it was more just something floating around in this happy air of freedom. I was free. My mother was far away, and I was the happiest that I had ever been in my life. I believed that life had promise and hope, and that the starving was only a part of life that we’d soon be through, and that eventually I’d be stable and I’d have my friends here in South Carolina around me.

I cleaned Jimmy’s room at night while he worked, and I listened to a lot of music, and I went on walks with Danielle to the grocery store where she’d buy us something cheap to eat, and I talked to Michael and Danielle when I walked into me and Jimmy’s bedroom to find them having sex on our bed. Michael had the biggest cock I’ve ever seen on a white boy. I was free, I walked around with nothing on but a t-shirt sometimes, when Danielle came into the room this didn’t change. We smoked hookah in the living room and in the bedroom floor. Jimmy and I fooled around and he made me come while we were sitting behind Danielle and Michael on the bed and they never noticed a thing, though I told them about it afterward. They watched him jerk me off in the living room after we all smoked hookah together. I’d go an visit Melanie in her room, though I know now she didn’t like me and she was mostly giving me courtesy responses and talking to me just because I was talking to her. She apparently had done a lot of drugs and had a lot and knew how to make some, she and Jimmy had their own pot that they made but they never made it when I was there, probably because they didn’t have the money to. Danielle and Michael got high on some kind of over-the-counter weed they got from a smokeshop and Danielle was really annoying when she was high, she thought everything was hilarious and liked to say “I can’t handle it! I can’t handle it!” at everything.

But I was so happy. I was taken care of, even if we were barely eating. And I had a boy coming home to me every night, and laying in bed beside me. When I went to sleep I knew that he would be there soon, and I would hold him.

And it lasted for about two months before Jimmy told me I should move back home.

My mom had told me I could come back. I think it was the lack of food that finally broke her. She has a heart, and she has a lot of compassion in her, though my experience with her and my perception of that experience would make it hard to believe sometimes. She’s not a bad person whatsoever, she’s a loving person, and she’s always loved me, and she wanted me to come home, she missed me and she didn’t want me to starve anymore. I told her that I wasn’t coming home at first, but then Jimmy said that I should. We spent the night crying. He was crying because he was under so much pressure to take care of us and he hated asking his parents for help, I was crying because I was always emotionally unstable, but now here I was starving and withdrawing from the medication that had taken me out of a hopeless void of anxiety and allowed me to live my life again. And I didn’t want to leave him. We said that we loved each other, but I don’t know that what it was was love. Like with the state of our relationship, it was something else, something of it’s own that didn’t need naming, it just happened, and that was how it was with us.

The next morning I was still upset. I didn’t want to go. He went to work, and that night he sent me a message on Facebook saying that I shouldn’t go, and that I should stay. I don’t remember if I’d already told my mother I was coming home, but it didn’t cause a problem either way that I stayed with Jimmy. Things continued on as they had, but not for much longer. Probably weeks, or a month, later, I don’t really remember, me going home was brought up again. I’d had two job interviews and I hadn’t gotten either job; Jimmy had been given a job at a BMW manufacturing plant on an assembly line. This was, apparently, his dream job. When I’d asked him about his dream he said that working in a factory and making a lot of money was his dream. So I guess he’d achieved it. My dreams of course were much bigger, or at least different, and special, even if his were special to him, I wanted to be a musician on stage, and he wanted to work in a factory and have a stable life. My goal has never been stability, it’s been abandon and love.

Since there would be a delay in the time Jimmy got his last paycheck from McDonalds and his first paycheck from BMW, we weren’t going to have money for about a month. Incidentally, Jimmy’s parents had never known that the money they were giving him for food was going to support me as well. He could make it for a month on his own, but not with me needing to eat too. So, since I’d told my mother already I’d come home for a week to see the doctor and get my medicine back, Danielle suggested I go home for a month, and come back when Jimmy got paid at BMW. Since he’d making a lot more money, we wouldn’t have to worry about starving anymore, and I could comfortably continue looking for a job.

But that night at work Jimmy sent me a message on Facebook saying I should go home permanently. We could have some space from another, because moving in together so fast (we’d known each other for between a week and two weeks when we moved in together) had been a strain on the relationship for both of us, and I’d be provided for, and he wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of me and relying on his parents to help support us. I listened to the song Sunday Afternoon by Rachael Yamagata while I packed my stuff that night. When he got home I sat on the end of his bed and cried, but I don’t think I cried as hard as I had the first time he’d decided I should go home, because I wanted to go. And I knew that this adventure with Jimmy couldn’t last forever. More than anything I was looking forward to eating. And in my heart I probably knew it was time for this silly relationship to come to an end.

We discussed breaking up. We both wanted to, but we weren’t going to do it, we were going to give it time. He was still going to come and see me like he’d done before, and maybe I could come up and visit for a while, and we could have space from one another that we needed.

But we probably both knew it was over. He avoided me most of the day, I kept trying to kiss him, to be affectionate to him, but he didn’t seem interested. He didn’t even seem to want to talk to me. I think we both really wanted me to go. My mother’s boyfriend came through South Carolina on his way back from his job in Georgia and he took me home to North Carolina with him.

I knew on the way back that Jimmy and I were over.

And I knew the first thing I was going to do when I got home.

Nathan and the person he’d been dating, Robert, an underage high-schooler Nathan had presumably met online, were looking to have a threesome, and since Nathan and I were experienced in that, they’d offered me a chance while I was in South Carolina. I even admitted to Jimmy that I really wanted to, when they offered it. Jimmy, understandably, had nothing but negative feelings toward Nathan, both because I’d told Jimmy about my past relationship with him and because I still hadn’t gotten over him. I knew on the way home I was going to have sex with the two of them.

I was home for about an hour before I called Nathan. I don’t even remember if I ate when I got there. I’d been yearning for a chance to be close to Nathan again. I think as some effort to try and keep myself from cheating on Jimmy, I’d called him before I called Nathan, but we didn’t say much because he was working. Nathan and Robert came and picked me up, and we went to Nathan’s father’s house, where he lived. I felt terribly guilty. I knew during our dinner on the patio, in this familiar place that I loved, that I was wrong for being here, that I was going to cheat on Jimmy. And at some point I went into the batrhoom and prayed. I prayed that I could be removed from this situation, that I wouldn’t cheat on Jimmy.

And it’s perhaps the only time I ever got an answer when I was praying, because I answered myself immediately, with perfect clarity. I understood that if I were going to cheat on Jimmy, it was my decision, and I did it willingly, and no one but me could change anything about it. I wasn’t going to be lifted out of the house and plopped back in my mother’s front yard where I’d been standing when Nathan arrived to bring me over. If I cheated on Jimmy, it was wholly my responsibility, because no one was forcing it on me, and honestly I’d been the one already bringing it up to Nathan and Robert.

And so, when I laid on top of Nathan and made out with him, and then moved between his legs and slipped his familiar cock into my mouth, I was making the decision. I didn’t value my relationship with Jimmy, which had all but come to an end anyway. I explored Robert too. He had a huge cock and an extremely small, but tight, ass. I’d ran my tongue along his asshole, I’d held his cock in my mouth, and when he went to leave the room to go and clean himself up before we had sex, I stopped him and fell to my knees and sucked him, and he jammed his cock into my mouth with extreme force, repeatedly, and made me gag and choke and cry, and it was so thrilling and satisfying, and when he pulled his cock out of my mouth, I had an open smile, my eyes sparkling with joy, precum and saliva running down my chin and from my lips, his smells and tastes in my mouth and on my face.

When Robert left the room, things became a little more real because now I had to wait to have sex, and the passion of the moment was put on hold, and the guilt got to me before I could finish, or even begin, having sex with them. I tried to make out with Nathan some more, but I was cheating on Jimmy and I needed to admit it to him and ask for his forgiveness, and so I told Nathan I couldn’t go through with it, and Nathan calmly nodded and said that that was fine. When Robert came back in the room, Nathan told him I’d decided not to go through with the threesome, and they were both totally fine with it. I tried calling Jimmy, but when he answered he was at work at McDonalds and didn’t have time, nor was he in the right place, for me to tell him what happened.

I was there, in that familiar bathroom of Nathan’s house, and my dream in South Carolina was over, and my relationship with Jimmy came to the fitting end I knew it would. Not fitting because Jimmy deserved to be cheated on, but it deserved to end because it was entered into without a spark of real love. Nathan and I had had some kind of awful, dysfunctional love, and it had been wrong too. I’d never known what it was to be in real love with someone, though love is incidental and personal and without rules and limits, so in a way I had loved Nathan, but it was time for my adventure with Jimmy to be over. I’d left South Carolina as quickly as I’d come, and I’d come in a different world that was the same old one I’d started in, and the hope and magic of living with Kim and Eileen was over and the hope and magic of being with Jimmy and Danielle in South Carolina was over. I was back in my mother’s house and in her world and in the world I’d lived before, though I’d experienced another place, another type of life, and a happiness that would soon begin slipping away to live there in it’s protected memory of South Carolina.

When I couldn’t get it out to him over the phone, I sent him a message on Facebook. He responded with anger and fury and called me a cheater and said that sending me to move back with my mother (I almost wrote “with Nathan,” that’s extremely fitting in many ways) was a test and that I’d failed. He’d known I would go right to Nathan and that was just what I did. The fact that according to him, he’d been playing games with me and testing me by sending me back (though in truth it was because he couldn’t handle the strained, close-quarters relationship anymore, and as I learned later on, Melanie and Danielle had told him he had to make me leave or they would make him leave), made me feel a little less guilty, and like I had some leverage in the argument. I may have cheated, but he was asking for it by playing games with me. Of course, I deserved to be broken up with, despite the circumstances, because I broke Jimmy’s trust when I cheated on him, and I didn’t even have the decency to break up with him before running straight to Nathan and Robert.

I cried, but after the messaging with Jimmy I felt relieved, because it was over, and Nathan and Robert consoled me a little, and I’d decide that since it was over I could, with no guilt, finish what I’d started. To be honest, I don’t remember what happened. I know I went back to sucking Robert’s cock, and I’m sure he came, and I remember him jerking me off, but that part is kind of a blur. I was finishing the dirty work I’d come here to do, and I was satisfied, and my relationship with Jimmy was over, and I listened to Tori Amos and went to sleep.